battlemented, of Duke Ottobuono's palace, from whose windows you look
down upon a sea, a kind of whirlpool, of melancholy grey mountains.
Then there are the people, dark, bushy-bearded men, riding about like
brigands, wrapped in green-lined cloaks upon their shaggy pack-mules;
or loitering about, great, brawny, low-headed youngsters, like the
parti-colored bravos in Signorelli's frescoes; the beautiful boys, like
so many young Raphaels, with eyes like the eyes of bullocks, and the
huge women, Madonnas or St. Elizabeths, as the case may be, with their
clogs firmly poised on their toes and their brass pitchers on their
heads, as they go up and down the steep black alleys. I do not talk
much to these people; I fear my illusions being dispelled. At the
corner of a street, opposite Francesco di Giorgio's beautiful little
portico, is a great blue and red advertisement, representing an angel
descending to crown Elias Howe, on account of his sewing-machines; and
the clerks of the Vice-Prefecture, who dine at the place where I get my
dinner, yell politics, Minghetti, Cairoli, Tunis, ironclads, &c., at
each other, and sing snatches of _La Fille de Mme. Angot,_ which I
imagine they have been performing here recently.

No; talking to the natives is evidently a dangerous experiment. Except
indeed, perhaps, to my good landlord, Signor Notaro Porri, who is just
as learned, and takes considerably less snuff (or rather brushes it off
his coat more often) than the Director of the Archives. I forgot to jot
down (and I feel I must jot down, in the vain belief that some day
these scraps will help, like a withered twig of olive or a three-wicked
Tuscan lamp on my table, to bring to my mind, in that hateful Babylon
of Berlin, these happy Italian days)--I forgot to record that I am
lodging in the house of a dealer in antiquities. My window looks up the
principal street to where the little column with Mercury on the top
rises in the midst of the awnings and porticoes of the market-place.